Irrational Fondness
September 23rd, 2009I have an irrational fondness for games in which you damage undead enemies by casting healing spells on them.
Guns and Acclimation
September 17th, 2009I was raised in a country where handgun ownership is legal (America) and have lived 14 years in a country where it is illegal (Japan).
When I first came to Japan, people constantly asked me if I owned a gun in the states, and were amazed when I said “no” (which leads me to wonder why they asked if I had a gun, instead of asking what *kind* of gun I owned, considering that they thought it obvious that of course I owned one). They were further amazed when I said that not only did I not have a gun, but I never saw a pistol except in the holster of a policeman, on TV, or behind glass in a store.
As time passes, memory grows hazy, so I had reached the point where I was convinced that the whole concept of “civilian ownership of guns” had never really affected me…until I just remembered something a few minutes ago:
When I first came to Japan, for an entire year, I had an instinctual aversion to people putting their hands in their inside jacket pockets and not immediately pulling out their wallet or cell phone. Just simple things, like reaching for a cell phone but being lost in conversation and leaving ones hand there for a few seconds was enough to get my heart racing.
Sure, I’d never *seen* a pistol “in the wild” in America, but I had seen, more than once, the *implication* of a pistol. The one I remember most vividly was in university, going out after midnight with some friends to buy a delicious taco from the taco truck. There was always a strange mix of people there (my university was in a bad area of town). One day, there was a pretty thuggy looking guy, and another guy in a designer Italian suit, looking very much the part of a rich drug dealer or otherwise wealthy criminal. The two got into an argument, and the guy in the nice suit put his hand in his inside suit pocket…and left it there. We still hadn’t ordered our tacos, but one of the quicker heads in my group said “Guys, I think we should leave now”. We turned and walked away. We never heard shots, so apparently the argument ended peacefully, but there’s no way the suit guy was threatening the thug guy with a business card or cell phone. Maybe he had a gun, and maybe he was pretending to have a gun, but “I have my hand in my inside coat pocket” was clearly *meant* to indicate “I have a gun.”
Alex Seems To Like Interpretive Dance (without music)
September 3rd, 2009He kept telling me “Daddy, take video”. So this wasn’t one of those “parents making kids do stuff for the camera” things, but a “kids making parents film them doing stuff” things.
A Sciency T-Shirt
August 29th, 2009I’ve told my wife that she should avoid buying t-shirts for my sons with English on them when I’m not with her, due to the likelihood of buying an Engrish t-shirt (which I personally would wear with no compunctions, but would feel a little bad having one of my kids wear). For some reason, she has chosen not to take this advice to heart. Yesterday she bought a shirt for Alex which she was sure I’d like, because it was “sciency”.
Here it is:
The Goggles…
August 22nd, 2009
Vehicle Parking Laws
August 14th, 2009I wonder how vehicle parking laws work.
I don’t mean the “you can park here, but you can’t park there” part. That’s pretty clear. What I mean is: how do the laws work such that they separate “leaving your vehicle on the side of the street” from “leaving your sofa on the side of the street”?
Vehicles (and I’m including bicycles and the like, not just automobiles) are pretty much the only thing I can think of which are not considered abandoned when you just kinda put them somewhere. If I see an umbrella leaning against a wall, I can probably legally take it (I’m guessing here), and I can certainly take it to a police box as a lost-and-found item. I doubt the same is true of bicycles.
Leaving aside the “legally take it if its abandoned” part (because I’m not sure about that), the whole “lost-and-found” issue is what I’m most curious of. The area around my train station is always choked with illegally parked bicycles. Sure, it’s not the worst in Japan (I’ve seen places where building entrances are rendered entirely unusable by bicycles), but there are a ton of bikes, and they are a pain in the ass to navigate around.
So, since they’re parked in areas marked “no bicycle parking”, would they legally be considered “abandoned” as opposed to “parked”? And could I then take them to a police box and say “Someone abandoned their bike in front of the station. Actually, I’ll be back in a few minutes, because a few hundred other people also abandoned their bikes in front of the station”?
And if you park your bike in front of the station, they can be towed away to the bike impound lot, where you have to pay to get them back. What about non-bikes? I’m 99.9% sure that a tricycle or unicycle would also get taken to the impound, but what about a wheelchair? What about an office chair with rollers? What about a sofa without rollers? Where is the dividing line between “this is a parked, but not abandoned, vehicle”, and “this is an abandoned non-vehicle”?
Is the assumption that they aren’t abandoned because they’re locked up? In which case, could you chain your sofa to a post and say “It isn’t abandoned, it’s just illegally placed”?
This is just gonna weigh on my mind forever, I can feel it.
Shout Outs – Part 3
August 2nd, 2009I was a geek in junior high, years before being a geek was cool. And, of course, nowadays people make a distinction between being a geek and being a nerd. Back in the day, it was six of one and half a dozen of the other, unless you were actually one of the geeks or nerds.
So I was a geeky kid, but folks around me just assumed since I had some nerd qualities, I must have all of them. So, for example (and the topic of this shout-out), they assumed I must like classical music exclusively.
To be honest, by seventh grade, which is when this specific event happened, I didn’t have *any* musical tastes. I just didn’t really listen to music. Sure, classical was fine, but it was just background music my parents listened to in the car. But to those around me, it seemed patently obvious that I must love Mozart and despise anything written by any musicians in the last 100 years.
So one of my classmates did something which I’m sure he meant to be “bullying”, but for which I have to be eternally grateful: he lent me a tape of the SubHuMans, a UK anarcho-punk band.
They rock.
That wasn’t the reaction the guy was expecting, of course. He expected to shock and disgust the classical purist priss. He wanted revulsion. Problem is, he was working off a nerd stereotype that didn’t apply to me. Fact is, I loved the tape immediately. It was a completely new type of music for me, something that I would never hear on the radio or on TV. I loved the crunchy guitars, the angry Brit vocals, the energy. The guy who lent me the tape didn’t believe it at first, and thought I was just hiding my dislike for the music, but eventually realized I actually liked the music as I started asking him to make copies of his Dead Kennedys tapes.
In the end, he went the opposite direction: after he realized that I liked a lot of the same music as he did (punk and industrial), he started hiding the names of the bands from me, worried that I’d take a liking to them too. But the damage was done: I’d gotten my introduction to a bunch of non-mainstream music, and realized that, while I had no interest in the top-40 stuff on the radio, I actually really liked music. A year later, I was tuning in KTRU on my alarm-clock radio.
Shout Outs – Part 2
July 31st, 2009One of the advantages of putting out an album is that you can write liner notes, thanking all your musical influences. The problem is, unless you put out an album, you can’t put out liner notes. So I’ll take this blog entry as an opportunity to shout out to my musical peeps.
As you’ll see in Shout Outs – Part 3, my musical development was not a gradual thing, but kinda sudden. Not that I suddenly replaced my Weird Al Yankovic tapes with Screaming Gibbon Vivisection Cake tapes, but I was rapidly exposed to a lot of new music in a very short time.
The biggest influence there, by far, was KTRU (Rice Radio) 91.7 FM. KTRU is Rice University’s radio station, and had a fairly unusual musical selection policy. While other college radio stations in the 80’s and 90’s avoided the regular radio system of “playing your favorite top 40 hits over and over again” and instead chose the wholly radical approach of “playing your favorite indie hits over and over again”, KTRU eschewed Pere Ubu and Galaxie500, instead following a policy, as near as I can tell, of “You should never listen to KTRU and think ‘oh, hey, they’re playing *that* song! I *love* that song!’, because that would mean you’ve heard that song before. Instead, you should think ‘what the heck is this?! This is awesome!’”. Admittedly, that’s a little long to fit on a bumper sticker.
I started listening to KTRU in late junior high school. Back then, they were broadcasting at a power of 1 watt or so, probably powering the station antenna off a pair of AA batteries. The station only came in at night, and I ended up with a Frankenstein array of aluminum hanging off my alarm clock radio antenna in order to improve the signal.
KTRU was largely free-form. They had a few specialty shows (MK Ultra’s techno show was the first place I ever heard jungle, and the first place I ever heard goa, both of which I love to this day), but for the most part the programming was non-thematic. And how non-thematic it was! A screaming abrasive noise piece would be followed by some 1930’s cowboy music, followed by some modern classical piece, followed by some anarch0-punk piece, followed by some spoken word piece, followed by a cascade of beeping and xylophones, etc.
This aspect of KTRU pretty much ruined my ability to be a DJ. A few years ago, I bought some software that allowed me to DJ using my computer. I played a handful of little parties, and, while I was a good ambient DJ, I was absolutely awful at anything else, because my aesthetic is a pure descendent of KTRU’s influence. While most DJs will start a set up, build up energy, switch into some favorite, maybe drop the tempo a bit to give people a rest, etc., my sets ended up completely devoid of flow. Fast would rush into slow, noisy into melodic, dark into happy, not in a “take the audience on a journey” way, but a “is this guy actually doing this on purpose, or has he just put his iTunes library on shuffle?” way.
And, yeah, at home I actually *do* quite enjoy putting my entire iTunes library on shuffle. I don’t think segueing from Beethoven to Screaming Gibbon Entrail Discovery to 70’s prog disrupts my flow, but improves it.
I’ve retreated a bit from the extreme musical tastes of my college days,but I still have to thank KTRU for te extreme breadth of genres it exposed me to, and for being the kind of college radio station that other college radio stations should want to be. My mp3 library might be a barren landscape of terrible Top40 music had I not had the fortune to encounter it.
Shout Outs – Part 1
July 27th, 2009One of the nice things about writing a book is that you can stick a list of acknowledgements at the start thanking the people who helped or influenced you. The problem, of course, is that you don’t get to write acknowledgements unless you write a book, and I have no plans for authorship in the near future.
So I’m going to take this blog entry as an occassion to give a shout out to people, things, or events I’m thankful for (skipping the obvious stuff like “mom and dad, god, my wife, and the editor”).
This particular shoutout goes to Daniel “Dan” Kutsko, my high school physics teacher. Kutsko is a bit of a maverick: he was an excellent excellent physics teacher. He’s still teaching, but I put this in the past tense because, while I assume he’s *still* kicking ass, I don’t know for sure, and untested assumptions aren’t really science.
Us students assumed that he had thus been an excellent physics student, but I gather, from talking to him, that as a student he was primarily interested in poker, with academics being secondary to that. You wouldn’t guess that from his classes, though.
He started the class with panache. The first line of his first lecture on the first day of class was “Newton was an asshole.” He got me interested in physics, which is still my favorite science. True, the work I do has nothing to do with physics, but that doesn’t make his contribution to my life any lesser. In university we had to take one year of science. There were three introductory physics courses. I don’t remember their names, but they were essentially “physics for physics majors” (hard, lotsa calculus), “physics for bio majors” (hard class, but less math), and “physics for people satisfying their science requirement” (really easy). I think I was the only person in the “physics for bio majors” class despite not being a bio major. My math skills weren’t good enough for the “physics for physics majors” class, but I wanted to take as rigorous a course as possible. And I was pretty good.
Another quote of Kutsko, which I always loved, was “Homework is like aspirin, you take it when you need it”. He always assigned homework, but it was always optional: if you totally understood the day’s coursework, you didn’t need to review via homework. If the day’s coursework was hard for you, that’s when you needed to review, so you could do the homework, which was voluntary.
I ended up taking a new and interesting course in University, which was “the philosophy of physics”. It wasn’t about the philosophy of science (“how do we know”, or “why use Occam’s Razor”), but instead a course about black holes and poincarean heated disks and the handedness of atomic breakup and the like. It was awesome, and it was also fun to see the philosophy majors (and this was senior year, so these weren’t people dabbling in philosophy, but almost graduating with degrees) completely flustered. There was not a single equation in sight, and yet they were completely befuddled by the philosophy and concepts.
So big props to Dan Kutsko, and I apologize for breaking the paper airplane on the wall.
When You Die
June 15th, 2009They say when you die that your whole life flashes before your eyes. But since dying doesn’t take decades, it must be sped up.
With Yakety Sax playing as the soundtrack.
